Slapshot, if not for articles like this, I wouldn't be reading about SotA right now. I visit MMORPG now and then, but I don't watch SotA. I did play Ultima Online in its glory days and long played in the player-run community. There's just enough hook here for me to read the article and some of these posts. It'll at least keep SotA in teh back of my mind.
Personally, I have a few reservations about SotA. The first is audience. Is there a large enough audience for it? Wurm Online, another sandbox MMO, is lucky to get 1500 concurrent users at peak times during special events. Wurm Online is geared for a small audience, but is SotA? My second concerns is cost. I disagree with charging so much for in-game property. Cash shops are part of this too. This is a "illness" not limited to SotA. Even the MMO I've been playing for some years now, Wurm Online, charges higher sums for larger plots of deeded land and its currency is purchasable. I think MMO's should have stayed at $15/month. Instead they opened the flood gates, enabling them to nurse their richest players. This has created a sometimes toxic gaming environment, whereby money is the sole determinant of your place in the world. It has also caused many players to lose trust in the MMO's they play or were supporting.
SotA has massive competition from other sandbox MMO's. When Ultima ONline was freshly minted, it very nearly stood alone. Now there're 100's of sandboxxy MMO's, from browser to MUDs to full 3d masterpieces. It's not a picnic anymore, and they're likely not prepared for it.
This is Wurm Online--at its heart it's almost like Ultima Online 2. Unlike UO, it's more crafting and building-oriented than PvM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBDYdVQoPw
SC launched Kickstarter in Oct 2012. Shroud in April 2013. That's 6 months earlier.
I didn't say when they launched their campaign. I said when they made the decision to launch a campaign. There's a run-up before it shows in KS. A lot of paperwork, planning a schedule of announcements, putting together a media campaign. You don't decide you want to crowdfund something and just post it on KS the next day.
And you don't think SC did the same?
Your argument is moot.
More smoke and mirrors. *rolls eyes*
WTH are you talking about? You said they CF'd because SC was successful. They decided to crowdfund before SC was really all that successful.
I don't think you understand what "moot" means.
I didn't say anything about anyone crowdfunding due to the success of SC. You're responding to the wrong person, genius.
Your anger is clouding your ability to think clearly.
Sure, you can just throw some crap on KS and crowdfund it. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of experience dealing with corporations, VCs, and angel investors, though.
I've talked to some teams about funding models a whole year before they announced anything. Just because you hear about something on Day X, doesn't mean they decided to do it on Day X - 1. It's especially true of new models of funding that haven't been very tested yet.
Did they rush to put a compaign together? Without a doubt. Did they start the actual process of registering for the KS campaign and notifying media only three months or so before the campaign, yeah. None of that has anything to do with the very specific point I was remarking on, which is that SC wasn't this massive success that made the Port guys suddenly decide to crowdfund. It's easy to look at SC's funding now and say that, but it wasn't like that in context. SC hadn't raised near enough to make a game at the end of their campaign, and there was no way to know post-campaign contributions would be on the level they have at the time.
So no, Port didn't see SC as this $100mil success and suddenly decide they wanted a piece of that pie. Those guys all hung out and talked together at the time, the idea was on the table way before anything was announced.
Ummmm you didn't watch the video then did you? The admitted in the video that YES they did only do croudfunding after SC was successful. Yes they worked on the game idea for less then 2 months before the start of the kickstarter. Yes in the video they admitted they didn't have a firm plan and only put it get out of the pickle they were in. They also admitted that if the kickstarter failed they would have been out of a job. This was to save the company cause their Social Networking game FAILED. The 7M in VC in Jun/Jul of 2012 was not for Shroud but the Social Netowrking game. They had staff and laid them all off in first week of Dec 2012. They admitted they rushed to put out the Kickstarter cause otherwise the company would be out of money in less then 90 days. So don't tell me they have been thinking about this for awhile before that cause that is total BULL$H1T they have admitted to it multiple times this was a long shot and why it wasn't well thought out.
Sure, you can just throw some crap on KS and crowdfund it. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of experience dealing with corporations, VCs, and angel investors, though.
I've talked to some teams about funding models a whole year before they announced anything. Just because you hear about something on Day X, doesn't mean they decided to do it on Day X - 1. It's especially true of new models of funding that haven't been very tested yet.
Did they rush to put a compaign together? Without a doubt. Did they start the actual process of registering for the KS campaign and notifying media only three months or so before the campaign, yeah. None of that has anything to do with the very specific point I was remarking on, which is that SC wasn't this massive success that made the Port guys suddenly decide to crowdfund. It's easy to look at SC's funding now and say that, but it wasn't like that in context. SC hadn't raised near enough to make a game at the end of their campaign, and there was no way to know post-campaign contributions would be on the level they have at the time.
So no, Port didn't see SC as this $100mil success and suddenly decide they wanted a piece of that pie. Those guys all hung out and talked together at the time, the idea was on the table way before anything was announced.
Ummmm you didn't watch the video then did you? The admitted in the video that YES they did only do croudfunding after SC was successful. Yes they worked on the game idea for less then 2 months before the start of the kickstarter. Yes in the video they admitted they didn't have a firm plan and only put it get out of the pickle they were in. They also admitted that if the kickstarter failed they would have been out of a job. This was to save the company cause their Social Networking game FAILED. The 7M in VC in Jun/Jul of 2012 was not for Shroud but the Social Netowrking game. They had staff and laid them all off in first week of Dec 2012. They admitted they rushed to put out the Kickstarter cause otherwise the company would be out of money in less then 90 days. So don't tell me they have been thinking about this for awhile before that cause that is total BULL$H1T they have admitted to it multiple times this was a long shot and why it wasn't well thought out.
The SotA crowd live in their own little version of reality. It's best to keep reminding yourself of that.
It is pointless to try and convince them otherwise.
Although it is quite fun to bring up facts and watch their little heads implode.
That's not really even applicable here, though; because the missing piece in your point is converting digital good to real money. You can pay money to Port to get in-game assets, but you can't convert in-game assets to real money. This model is specifically used to combat that very thing. So you can accumulate digital wealth from your purchases, but not real wealth. Nothing is going to be worth in real money second-hand what you paid for it from the cash shop, even if you find some way to market it.
I'm sorry, but this is why you're getting so much personal criticism from others; what you state here is literally 180 degrees off the actual truth. It really is.
Firstly not only is trading assets for real money legally accepted, it's hosted on their own official marketplace. You say there's a missing link. There really isn't. It's right there on their own forums.
"Real Estate is the most precious material of the game. We don't want to
swamp the world with new territory, with new lots, that suddenly those
lots people paid a lot of money for are worthless
If you read the whole article by the way, Richard referred specifically to asking Roberts for advice on running their own fundraising;
"The first answer I half expect: Chris Roberts of Star Citizen fame
helped him along. It's not surprising given the similarities between
buying spaceships with real money and buying houses with real money.
He does it at 41 minutes here too. Your critics were right. SC not only began considerably before SotA, but RG directly took inspiration from it and has publicly stated so.
And RMT profiteering is happening. Portalarium have an official RMT partner in the shape of Markee Dragon. I personally made $170 over the total on my Royal Founder Ancestor account, and although that wasn't the intention of selling it at the time, I've done myself what you say is impossible. And the buyer thought they in turn would make a further profit later.
Maybe, let me ask this. Where do you see the similarity in some
people finding a way to capitalize on a game that they bought, and a
company selling equity to people? Those seem wildly different to me, so
I have to be missing your point there.
You're changing your argument again. I already quoted your earlier phrasing where it's identical.
"and in that case only because I worry some people may actually think of it as an investment"
Clearly they do. Now however you're changing it to "Yes, but from the seller's perspective..." That perspective is irrelevant to my argument. You can always find somewhere to stand to make two things look different; but on the perspective that you feared it was encouraging users to think of the game as an investment; people do.
Are they all somehow wrong about this? Is Shroud not an investment to them?
As for the MMO question;
So yes, they did avoid calling the spade a spade, but read through what
they were intending. It's online (with an offline component), it's
multiplayer, and it's persistent with an player-driven economy. To site
your linked archive: "Multiplayer Online Game - which can also be
played solo player / offline" Note how solo/offline is the after
thought there. In the same original description of the game, they
mention player housing in the persistent world, meaningful crafting
related to combat, PvP, and playing scenes in groups. None of which
can be done solo and offline.
Firstly, Diablo has PvP and Online/Offline and multiplayer; but is Diablo an MMO in the same way Shroud is?
Secondly, Shroud Offline also has persistent housing, and crafting related to combat. Shroud Friends Online has PvP and playing in groups.
But why should we even try and debate this? You openly agree that they deliberately avoided calling a spade a spade. And tried to excuse it by pointing to market trends, as if the age old advice from your mother about "Well if everyone was jumping off the roof..." no longer applies. It does though, Portalarium deliberately called a spade a shovel. We agree.
Other games do the same thing, as they'll demo a prototype that often
isn't in the same engine as the eventual game. It's just to give
prospective publishers (and in this case backers) an idea of what the
goal is.
I know this, we ALL know that early peeks aren't representative of the final product; indeed many of us have gamed long enough to remember when box art might be taken on entirely different systems!
The point was Portalarium swapped to an engine that couldn't DO what they promised.
Whether because they can't code it well enough too, or because the engine itself isn't suitable (which was the point of mentioning the problem with Unity and multi-level floors) is minor compared to the fact they made, and kept making poor design choices they've not funded well either, and they have no intention of ever changing that.
We would all of us love to get a game that we " like what it is and want to spend money on it"; what we never wanted was it to get diverted off into being primarily about supporting Real Money Trading, to have our personal security and children threatened by people who see us as getting in the way of them making a profit, to be hounded out of forums because we point to things that are blatantly obvious, and to watch our purchases become hateful as neither the staff nor the tools available mean we ever can GET the sort of game we wanted.
You don't decide you want to crowdfund something and just post it on KS the next day.
Yeah.. that would just result in making up mechanics and lots of changes... customers would probably be very disappointed in the final product and you'd likely be begging for additional funding before the game was complete.
Oh wait...
Okay, name an MMO that crowdfunded and then didn't have a revenue model in place before officially launching.
The part that is not good for players, but has been good for
the companies that made a lot of these games, is how to squeeze money
out of ‘free-to-play’. And that’s the part we are avoiding like the
plague. It is actually a good monetization strategy to take a
‘free-to-play’ game and fill it with tons of microtransactions, and then
tons of ways to leverage you, to try to convince you to either start
making microtransactions, or spam all of your friends to hopefully find
one of them to make microtransactions. And while that’s proven to be a
very successful business model, I don’t think it makes for very good
games. And since we’re trying to create a ‘gamer’s game’, we’re going to
avoid that monetization strategy.
Remember the Referral bonuses in Shroud? You got free stuff if you got 5 or more people to sign up!
More quotes in there by the way about the primacy of Single Player with Multiplayer hook ins. But we agree on that, as already said; they called this shovel a spade.
Pls stop, you're not doing any good to the game and to your friends who's working at Port. There is litteraly nothing good about this game and company. The only reason why we don't see anything on their forum is, if the backers dare to say something negative, they will get banned. Outside their website, they're getting so much hate , it's not even funny.. Thomas ,there is a reason why people don't like the game and even more the staff, AKA Chris the super tech. The game is bad and the company is going nowhere.
Personally, I have a few reservations about SotA. The first is audience. Is there a large enough audience for it? Wurm Online, another sandbox MMO, is lucky to get 1500 concurrent users at peak times during special events. Wurm Online is geared for a small audience, but is SotA?
Missed this comment, sorry;
Shroud might not be geared for a small audience, but it's getting one.
It's roughly 1/3rd the size of Wurm Online; The developer Chris Spears, even with his infamous attempts at spin only listed 500 Concurrency in the recent Reddit AMA. Steam, which has just over 1/2 of all accounts shows sub 200 most days, which roughly agrees.
Whether it can survive on that is another question. In active development? I'd say no chance. The real reason we think they've said Episode 2 onwards will require a second Kickstarter, and they're running Telethons and SeedInvests all at once is because they can't afford to keep running as they currently are with the kind of staff required to keep producing new features.
Moving into maintenance mode though, and continuing selling items to keep the servers on (because Shroud now runs on centralised servers like any other MMO) however? Probably, although for how long it'll survive based upon that we can only guess.
But unless they have an incredibly successful advertising blitz and get new users in that way, the game effectively launched when it went Persistent back in July 2016 but hasn't had a larger player base since then, even with all the Free Trials. People give it a go, just don't like it, and don't stay. Again, Chris Spears admitted 80% of Free Trial players didn't even last more than 2 hours. But without the new players and new money, they can't change the game so people do like it... they're getting by on the tiny amount of die-hards that are left.
Comments
Personally, I have a few reservations about SotA. The first is audience. Is there a large enough audience for it? Wurm Online, another sandbox MMO, is lucky to get 1500 concurrent users at peak times during special events. Wurm Online is geared for a small audience, but is SotA? My second concerns is cost. I disagree with charging so much for in-game property. Cash shops are part of this too. This is a "illness" not limited to SotA. Even the MMO I've been playing for some years now, Wurm Online, charges higher sums for larger plots of deeded land and its currency is purchasable. I think MMO's should have stayed at $15/month. Instead they opened the flood gates, enabling them to nurse their richest players. This has created a sometimes toxic gaming environment, whereby money is the sole determinant of your place in the world. It has also caused many players to lose trust in the MMO's they play or were supporting.
SotA has massive competition from other sandbox MMO's. When Ultima ONline was freshly minted, it very nearly stood alone. Now there're 100's of sandboxxy MMO's, from browser to MUDs to full 3d masterpieces. It's not a picnic anymore, and they're likely not prepared for it.
This is Wurm Online--at its heart it's almost like Ultima Online 2. Unlike UO, it's more crafting and building-oriented than PvM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBDYdVQoPw
Your anger is clouding your ability to think clearly.
~~ postlarval ~~
It is pointless to try and convince them otherwise.
Although it is quite fun to bring up facts and watch their little heads implode.
~~ postlarval ~~
I'm sorry, but this is why you're getting so much personal criticism from others; what you state here is literally 180 degrees off the actual truth. It really is.
Firstly not only is trading assets for real money legally accepted, it's hosted on their own official marketplace. You say there's a missing link. There really isn't. It's right there on their own forums.
Secondly, the ability of players to make that money on real items is based upon rarity at the time, and desirability at a later time. And this was designed into the system deliberately by Portalarium;
If you read the whole article by the way, Richard referred specifically to asking Roberts for advice on running their own fundraising;
He does it at 41 minutes here too. Your critics were right. SC not only began considerably before SotA, but RG directly took inspiration from it and has publicly stated so.
And RMT profiteering is happening. Portalarium have an official RMT partner in the shape of Markee Dragon. I personally made $170 over the total on my Royal Founder Ancestor account, and although that wasn't the intention of selling it at the time, I've done myself what you say is impossible. And the buyer thought they in turn would make a further profit later.
You're changing your argument again. I already quoted your earlier phrasing where it's identical.
"and in that case only because I worry some people may actually think of it as an investment"
Clearly they do. Now however you're changing it to "Yes, but from the seller's perspective..." That perspective is irrelevant to my argument. You can always find somewhere to stand to make two things look different; but on the perspective that you feared it was encouraging users to think of the game as an investment; people do.
How much more blatant does it have to be? Here's a single thread containing an official announcement of the acceptability of RMT, Markee Dragon personally visting Portalarium, and the sociopath who has spent months harassing me and openly bragged on Reddit about trying to hurt me declaring he's RMTing Shroud.
Are they all somehow wrong about this? Is Shroud not an investment to them?
As for the MMO question;
Firstly, Diablo has PvP and Online/Offline and multiplayer; but is Diablo an MMO in the same way Shroud is?
Secondly, Shroud Offline also has persistent housing, and crafting related to combat. Shroud Friends Online has PvP and playing in groups.
But why should we even try and debate this? You openly agree that they deliberately avoided calling a spade a spade. And tried to excuse it by pointing to market trends, as if the age old advice from your mother about "Well if everyone was jumping off the roof..." no longer applies. It does though, Portalarium deliberately called a spade a shovel. We agree.
I know this, we ALL know that early peeks aren't representative of the final product; indeed many of us have gamed long enough to remember when box art might be taken on entirely different systems!
The point was Portalarium swapped to an engine that couldn't DO what they promised.
Whether because they can't code it well enough too, or because the engine itself isn't suitable (which was the point of mentioning the problem with Unity and multi-level floors) is minor compared to the fact they made, and kept making poor design choices they've not funded well either, and they have no intention of ever changing that.
We would all of us love to get a game that we " like what it is and want to spend money on it"; what we never wanted was it to get diverted off into being primarily about supporting Real Money Trading, to have our personal security and children threatened by people who see us as getting in the way of them making a profit, to be hounded out of forums because we point to things that are blatantly obvious, and to watch our purchases become hateful as neither the staff nor the tools available mean we ever can GET the sort of game we wanted.
Shroud of the Avatar.
THAT'S THE JOKE HE WAS MAKING.
At least, it didn't have a revenue model that worked, or matched the one that we were told it would be using before hand.
Remember the Referral bonuses in Shroud? You got free stuff if you got 5 or more people to sign up!
More quotes in there by the way about the primacy of Single Player with Multiplayer hook ins. But we agree on that, as already said; they called this shovel a spade.
Pls stop, you're not doing any good to the game and to your friends who's working at Port. There is litteraly nothing good about this game and company. The only reason why we don't see anything on their forum is, if the backers dare to say something negative, they will get banned. Outside their website, they're getting so much hate , it's not even funny..
Thomas ,there is a reason why people don't like the game and even more the staff, AKA Chris the super tech. The game is bad and the company is going nowhere.
Shroud might not be geared for a small audience, but it's getting one.
It's roughly 1/3rd the size of Wurm Online; The developer Chris Spears, even with his infamous attempts at spin only listed 500 Concurrency in the recent Reddit AMA. Steam, which has just over 1/2 of all accounts shows sub 200 most days, which roughly agrees.
Whether it can survive on that is another question. In active development? I'd say no chance. The real reason we think they've said Episode 2 onwards will require a second Kickstarter, and they're running Telethons and SeedInvests all at once is because they can't afford to keep running as they currently are with the kind of staff required to keep producing new features.
Moving into maintenance mode though, and continuing selling items to keep the servers on (because Shroud now runs on centralised servers like any other MMO) however? Probably, although for how long it'll survive based upon that we can only guess.
But unless they have an incredibly successful advertising blitz and get new users in that way, the game effectively launched when it went Persistent back in July 2016 but hasn't had a larger player base since then, even with all the Free Trials. People give it a go, just don't like it, and don't stay. Again, Chris Spears admitted 80% of Free Trial players didn't even last more than 2 hours. But without the new players and new money, they can't change the game so people do like it... they're getting by on the tiny amount of die-hards that are left.